The Art of Pre-Selling: Why it could make or break your Affiliate Marketing Career!

Are you a shiny new affiliate marketer? Or maybe youve been on the scene for a little while but still havent made that wondrous first sale? Heres one more question; have you ever heard of pre-selling? If not, then youre probably going to be kicking yourself in the face, because chances are this is the reason that you have yet to make a single sale.

Let us think about it for a minute and put yourself in your customers shoes. For this example, we will say that youre customer wants to purchase a book on growing fruit trees. Guess what?! You just so happen to be an affiliate for a company that specializes in books on fruit trees! This is your lucky day right? Well, if youre not pre-selling the product, then youd be wrong. Your customer is going to quickly become either fed up or suspicious, and leave what could be a wonderful page and pass up what may be a wonderful product because of sheer monotony; because YOU didnt PRE-sell. Read on and Ill explain.

Just imagine: Youve just been given a gorgeous peach tree for your birthday. You realize that though this is a wonderful gift, you dont know the first thing about caring for a peach tree! This could be a real problem, as dead peach trees produce no shade, no flowers, and no peaches. So you go online with the soul intent of finding the perfect book to explain how to give your new tree the best start in life. Finally, you find a book that you deem perfect for the job. You read over what looks to be a sale page, and after some reading are absolutely sold! Youre all ready to buy! So you click the link with credit card in hand, assuming youll be redirected to a payment page, but instead youre directed to&a page that is trying to sell this book&AGAIN? Didnt you just get done reading the sales page? After thinking about it, its kind of fishy that there would be TWO sales pages. So you decide that maybe this book isnt the best book for the job, and you click away from the page to give your money to someone else.

Can we all spot what went wrong? Thats right; it was a typical example of not pre-selling the product. Im going to show you how to fix this problem!

First, lets break down the words pre-selling. Pre is a prefix meaning before and selling is the act of making a sale. Looking at the word, I can see how people can get confused. Sell is still part of the word, so one would assume that there would be selling involved. So from now on, dont think of pre-selling as a type of sale per say, but rather, a way of warming up your customer to the idea of selling. Its not your job to make the sale. I cant stress that enough. Sure, youre one of the people that will be benefiting from a sale, but its still not your job regardless whether youre earning a cut or not. Ultimately, an affiliate is just someone who drives more traffic to the companys website. That being the case, the company already has the job of selling down to a science! Its their job to sweat over the little details of their site that add selling power. Your job is to drive traffic to your site, get them warmed up and itching to buy the product, and direct them to the place where they can read more about the product (if they choose) and buy it, bringing in money to you and the company to which you are affiliated. So do you see why this could be a major reason that you still havent made any money yet? People dont like reading things over and over. I know I sure dont! I go crazy if I start looking for information only to find a number of pages that all say the same basic thing. Besides, with all the scams out there, do you really want to give things like your credit card number out on some site that has two identical pages of nearly the exact same information? Id worry it was some sort of scam, or even worse yet, that it was just a method of harvesting my information. The internet is full of so many scams and ways to steal your identity that you really have to be skeptical and overly cautious wherever you go online.

In conclusion, ALWAYS warm your customer up by pre-selling. I know its tempting to try and sell the product on your page (and sometimes a lot easier), but you will make so many more commissions if you warm your customer up first and let the pros worry about how to pitch their product!

Thanks for reading!

Stephenie Terry is 19 and lives comfortably in Southern California. She works from home as an affiliate marketer. Are you a shiny new affiliate marketer? Or maybe youve been on the scene for a little while but still havent made that wondrous first sale? Heres one more question; have you ever heard of pre-selling? If not, then youre probably going to be kicking yourself in the face, because chances are this is the reason that you have yet to make a single sale.

Let us think about it for a minute and put yourself in your customers shoes. For this example, we will say that youre customer wants to purchase a book on growing fruit trees. Guess what?! You just so happen to be an affiliate for a company that specializes in books on fruit trees! This is your lucky day right? Well, if youre not pre-selling the product, then youd be wrong. Your customer is going to quickly become either fed up or suspicious, and leave what could be a wonderful page and pass up what may be a wonderful product because of sheer monotony; because YOU didnt PRE-sell. Read on and Ill explain.

Just imagine: Youve just been given a gorgeous peach tree for your birthday. You realize that though this is a wonderful gift, you dont know the first thing about caring for a peach tree! This could be a real problem, as dead peach trees produce no shade, no flowers, and no peaches. So you go online with the soul intent of finding the perfect book to explain how to give your new tree the best start in life. Finally, you find a book that you deem perfect for the job. You read over what looks to be a sale page, and after some reading are absolutely sold! Youre all ready to buy! So you click the link with credit card in hand, assuming youll be redirected to a payment page, but instead youre directed to&a page that is trying to sell this book&AGAIN? Didnt you just get done reading the sales page? After thinking about it, its kind of fishy that there would be TWO sales pages. So you decide that maybe this book isnt the best book for the job, and you click away from the page to give your money to someone else.

Can we all spot what went wrong? Thats right; it was a typical example of not pre-selling the product. Im going to show you how to fix this problem!

First, lets break down the words pre-selling. Pre is a prefix meaning before and selling is the act of making a sale. Looking at the word, I can see how people can get confused. Sell is still part of the word, so one would assume that there would be selling involved. So from now on, dont think of pre-selling as a type of sale per say, but rather, a way of warming up your customer to the idea of selling. Its not your job to make the sale. I cant stress that enough. Sure, youre one of the people that will be benefiting from a sale, but its still not your job regardless whether youre earning a cut or not. Ultimately, an affiliate is just someone who drives more traffic to the companys website. That being the case, the company already has the job of selling down to a science! Its their job to sweat over the little details of their site that add selling power. Your job is to drive traffic to your site, get them warmed up and itching to buy the product, and direct them to the place where they can read more about the product (if they choose) and buy it, bringing in money to you and the company to which you are affiliated. So do you see why this could be a major reason that you still havent made any money yet? People dont like reading things over and over. I know I sure dont! I go crazy if I start looking for information only to find a number of pages that all say the same basic thing. Besides, with all the scams out there, do you really want to give things like your credit card number out on some site that has two identical pages of nearly the exact same information? Id worry it was some sort of scam, or even worse yet, that it was just a method of harvesting my information. The internet is full of so many scams and ways to steal your identity that you really have to be skeptical and overly cautious wherever you go online.

In conclusion, ALWAYS warm your customer up by pre-selling. I know its tempting to try and sell the product on your page (and sometimes a lot easier), but you will make so many more commissions if you warm your customer up first and let the pros worry about how to pitch their product!

Thanks for reading!

Stephenie Terry is 19 and lives comfortably in Southern California. She makes a living through her career as an affiliate marketer. http://tinyurl.com/yuwokk